Musings from my desk

Most experiences in life are wave-like. Grief, love, joy, melancholy, boredom, excitement, interests, hobbies - they all wax and wane with time. The frequency and amplitude varies over time of course, and the waves are rarely (never?) perfectly sinusoidal, but this basic metaphor matches much of my lived experience. Thinking of experience as wave-like is useful for me, because it helps me remember to celebrate the good moments, and not dwell in the low moments. All moments are fleeting, so it is best to simply accept them as they are.

I have a friend, also a software engineer, who is starting to look for a new job. I asked him what his ideal next job looked like. He listed a lot of standard things like better pay and a healthy work culture, but he also said he wanted interesting problems to work on.

Interesting problems are one of the hardest things to find in a job, in my experience. Any job has moments of working on interesting problems, but sustained, long-term involvement in interesting problems is such a rarity in the tech world. I’m not sure if this is inevitable or not.

Reflecting on this topic made me realize that this is why I am trying to learn C++ and DSP: so I can work on “interesting problems”. Of course I’m sure if I ever make this career leap, I will find the same thing is true - the interesting problems come and go with time. As everything in life, they are wave-like. But until then, it renews my motivation to learn more about this new and challenging domain.

Miscellaneous coding preference: return early rather than nesting business logic inside a conditional.

Bad:

function example() {
  const optional = returnOptional()

  if (optional) {
    // all business logic,
    // including additional nestings
  }
  // implicit `return undefined`
}

Good:

function example() {
  const optional = returnOptional()

  if (!optional) {
    // explicit return value,
    // good for clarity and intentionality
    return null
  }

  // all business logic,
  // starting at the top-level of nesting!
}

My review of the movie Trap:

Just like Jaws, if the humans had said “We gonna get this shark. We’re going to set a trap it can never escape. We’re going to trap it in the Atlantic Ocean. We’ll check every fish that comes out. There’s absolutely no way it can escape.”

If a taco is made in the woods, and nobody is around to eat it, does it taste good?

“These _____ times” has to be one of my least favorite phrases. “These changing times”, “These trying times”, “These dystopian times”. I dislike it because it makes such a massive assumption about the reader. It’s like a nudge and a wink, saying “we feel the same way”. But you don’t know me, and you don’t know how I feel. It also avoids naming the things which we are talking about. We might both believe that our modern era is dystopian, but we may believe that for completely different reasons. Is it useful to find common ground over ambiguous declarations of what our modern times are like? I say no. It’s bad writing, please stop.